Les amuses bouches
by Argentine Rose
Summary: Ignoring the dubious food imagery, this is a collection of oneshots and short stories, some amusing and others not (intentionally) so.
1. I Blame The Parents!

A/N A tale of excruciating stupidity which I wrote on the train going to work. It just goes to show what happens when you open mouth - or pick up pen - before engaging brain (as my dad would say)  
  
I blame the Parents!  
  
Heaven. A place of fluffy, whiter-than-white white clouds, smiling cherubs and gleaming marble architecture. A place of perfect happiness and everlasting joy where we will be re-united with our dearly departed families to frolic in the permanent sunshine for ever and ever, Amen.  
  
Which means that someone, somewhere along the line, made a terrible, terrible mistake. "Perfect happiness and joy" and a reunion with all your dead rellies are just not two things that go together. They are, in fact, mutually exclusive. Unless, of course, it's the kind of reunion where you make polite conversation for ten minutes about Auntie Flora's bowel operation, eat some cake, then bugger off down the pub/for a ride in the woods/ to sit in your room reading the Marquis de Sade, listening to teenage goth rock and moping. Or whatever floated your boat when faced with these situation on earth.  
  
But I digress. Which was rather fun. Maybe I should do it again. Maybe I should do it a la mode de Victor Huge And ramble on for seventy pages about a character who is subsequently NEVER SEEN AGAIN.  
  
Maybe not.  
  
Now, if we ignore the fact that they are standing on a gleaming golden escalator moving upwards through banks of fluffy clouds, the arrival of Les Amis de l'ABC in heaven looks much like their arrival at the barricades. Gavroche running around in front, singing and chasing the cherubs as if they were pigeons; Enjolras striding purposefully ahead of his friends; Eponine and Javert lurking at the back hoping that no-one would notice them.  
Which, by and large, no-one did. If surrounded by the wonders of heaven I doubt you would either,  
  
The Amis stand around like a group of Japanese tourists, gawping at the architecture. Jehan begins to weep at the beauty of it all. Gavroche finally manages to catch a cherub and begins to taunt it.  
  
"I really wouldn't do that, gamin", says Enjolras.  
  
"Shut up, greenhorn! And why not?"  
  
"Because it's probably illegal", says Javert.  
  
"And you might catch something," adds Joly  
  
The cherub promptly smacks Gavroche over the head with its harp and flies off laughing.  
  
"Or because it might do that, " says a voice. A voice of infinite strangeness that seems to reverberate in the very marrow of their bones. They spin around - could this be the voice of god?  
  
It is, in fact, the voice of the Bishop of Digne, aided by a child's plastic megaphone.  
  
"Rather fun that, "says the Bishop in his normal voice. "Amazing the things you find up here. Only the other day I was soaring through the clouds contemplating the majesty of God's creation when I came upon a jar of marmalade, three unmatched socks and some back copies of 'Playboy'. Now, I said to myself, "BIENVENU", I said " -"  
  
"Yes, but where are we?" Interrupts Enjolras, "And what are we doing here?"  
  
"You are in heaven" He pauses, waiting for the shocked intakes of breath and exclamations of disbelief that usually followed this announcement.  
  
"Yeah, figured as much," says Enjolras.  
  
"My my, you are a quick bunch," beamed the Bishop. "Normally we have to spend ages just trying to persuade people that they're actually dead."  
  
"Sir," says Enjolras icily, "all of us were horribly shot - "  
  
" - Not all of us, " comes a glum voice from the back. "I escaped being horribly shot only to kill myself in a fit of rage and despair. Which I heartily regret doing now - especially since I seem to have lost my hat along the way."  
  
"Thanks for sharing, mouchard. Although it does serve to prove my point. All of us here have the sense to realise that we're dead."  
  
"Except possibly Marius," says Courfeyrac.  
  
"Ah, yes - with the possible exception of Marius. Where is he anyway?"  
  
Ten minutes pass whilst our jolly company run around calling out "Marius! Marius!" as they go. The Bishop smiles patiently and waits for them to finish.  
  
" The one you call 'Marius' is not actually dead," he finally announces  
  
"Couldn't you have told us that before?" asks Bossuet.  
  
"You will learn truth is given by god to us all in our time, in our turn," replies the old man mildly.  
  
"This can't be heaven," whines Eponine, "no Marius and full of loonies."  
  
"I agree that the place is rather reminiscent of the Charenton asylum for the insane" says Javert.  
  
"Too bloomin' right copper! Who'da though I'd get to heaven only to find some old geezer talking crap in a pointy hat!"  
  
"My dear Gavroche, I am a Bishop - talking crap in a pointy hat is my speciality. This is certainly heaven, a place of perfect happiness and infinite delight - and we have a surprise for you!"  
  
Suddenly a smoky mist appears. Joly begins to cough violently  
  
"Turn it cough, cough off Please cough turn it off!"  
  
"What is it people have against my dry ice?" mutters the Bishop. "I only use it to make things a little more exciting."  
  
Through he remaining mist, approaching figures are seen moving towards them  
  
"Who are they?" inquires Enjolras.  
  
"My dear boy - those are your parents."  
  
Instantaneously Les Amis, Eponine and Javert all go as white as a chameleon on a wedding dress. Only Gavroche maintains his sang-froid  
  
"This is gonna be frickin' hilarious," he chortles, "I'm in fer a right laugh here"  
  
First to arrive - if we interpret his vain attempt to hide in Javert's greatcoat as a sign of great error - were Joly's parents.  
  
"Fiston! Fiston!" Calls Joly's father, "Come here - I want a word with you!"  
  
"Yes," says Joly's mother, "he wants a word with you."  
  
"Er, Mm, Dad - how can you be here? You're not dead."  
  
"Yes we are. We died of shame when we heard you'd gone to the barricades."  
  
"Bet you didn't think it was clinically possible to die of shame., did you boy? Bet all your fancy medical training didn't teach you that, eh?"  
  
Joly squirms  
  
"Well, you just come along with us. You're grounded for a year. Heaven knows what the neighbours will think." shrieks Joly's mother.  
  
"But I don't feel well, " says Joly lamely.  
  
"You'll be feeling more than unwell by the time I've finished with you lad" shouts his father.  
  
Next to appear from the mist are a happy middle class couple clutching a book entitled 'How to Handle Your Teenage Revolutionary: a Guide to the Difficult Years' At the moment they appear, a strange series of changes come over Enjolras. His normally upright posture changes to a slouchy hunch, his hair falls over his eyes and his begins to pout.  
  
"Hello Kevin dear," says Mme Enjolras.  
  
"Urgh," grunts Enjolras.  
  
"How have you been son? We've missed you," says M Enjolras.  
  
"Family hug time!" says Mme Enjolras.  
  
And they try to engulf Enjolras in a group hug.  
  
"Urgh, gerroff Mum! You're so embarrassing. It's so unfair! I hate you!"  
  
" We're so glad you had fun on the barricade with your little friends"  
  
"It's so unfair dad - you never let me go anywhere!"  
  
"But we drove you to the Rue Mondetour ourselves"  
  
"I hate you - bourgeois oppressors of the people! It's so unfair!"  
  
"But we think the revolution is a lovely idea Kevin. Your dad's even wearing his musical socks that play the Marseillaise"  
  
Which M Enjolras' socks promptly proceed to do.  
  
"God I hate you! You're so embarrassing! It's so unfair! Why don't I just die?" Enjolras whined and stormed off across the fluffy clouds, followed by his adoring parents.  
  
"I think I have just wet myself laughing," chortled Gavroche.  
  
"I think I have just wet myself from fear," gasped Eponine, pointing with a shaking finger.  
  
Emerging from the mist like three pirate galleons are a trio of woman. First comes Mme Thenardier. Then a short, round woman dressed, for some inexplicable reason, like a Sicilian widow. Then a tall, thin woman dressed, equally inexplicably, like Margaret Thatcher  
  
The resemblance to the Iron Lady is really quite striking  
  
Grantaire, without seeming to be quite aware of it, clutches Javert's hand and squeezes it convulsively  
  
"Oh God," he whimpers.  
  
"What God would that be?" says Javert, squeezing back.  
  
The Thenardiess is the first to arrive. Looking much like an irate woolly mammoth she picks up Eponine, without uttering a word, and lumbers off into the distance holding the screaming teenager over her head.  
  
Gavroche, smiling wickedly, runs after her.  
  
"What about me? Aren't you going to punish me Mum?" he asks in his most cheerful voice.  
  
"Who . . . ARE . . . You?" rumbles the Thenardiess before trundling off into the distance.  
  
"God I love having negligent parents!"  
  
"Romeo!" Calls the stout woman in perhaps the most ridiculously over-the-top and clichéd Italian accented ever to be heard by man. "Romeo! Romioli! Where are you?"  
  
The amis look about in confusion - to whom could the crazy Signora be referring to? Finally their eyes settle on Grantaire, with has gone from pale to beetroot.  
  
"R, you never told me your name was Romeo," sniggers Combeferre.  
  
"Are you surprised by that? And my surname's really Corleone - if you must know."  
  
"Romioli Corleone - where you been you bad, bad bambino? You wanna break you mamma's heart? See, I slappa you over the head!"  
  
Which she then does  
  
"I had to sent the Godfather to look for you. Where you been?"  
  
"Mama, I told you - I went to university in Paris"  
  
"What you want to be in Paris for? You wanna be home in Sicilia making vendettas and eating ravioli and looking after you Mamma! See, I slappa you rounda the head."  
  
Which she again does.  
  
"But Mamma - "  
  
"Shuddupa you face! Ainta you gotta no respect?"  
  
"My dear, I know!" drawled the tweedy woman, "children these days. This son of mine, for example. Digrace! Utter bloody disgrace! Runs off leaving me and the spaniels to look after the old pile - falling down around our bally ears! And what's worse, he starts telling people some bally rot about having been born in a jail and having a gypsy fortune teller for a mother. Me - I'm a countess! Do you have anything to say for yourself boy?"  
  
Javert mutters something under his breath.  
  
"What's that boy? Speak up! People don't mutter when they talk to me!"  
  
"Sorry mater"  
  
"I should bally well hope so."  
  
"Right . .. .. So R's a Mafioso and the mouchard's an aristo. Curiouser and curiouser," says Combeferre. "Why did you leave - I think being a Mafioso aristo sounds quite cool."  
  
"I just couldn't stand it any more," say Grantaire and Javert in unison  
  
"The money"  
  
"The power"  
  
"The parties"  
  
"The pasta"  
  
"No-one taking me seriously."  
  
"Everyone thinking they were going to wake up next to a horse head if they looked at me sideways"  
  
"The women"  
  
"Urgh - the women"  
  
"Julietta was a very nice girl!"  
  
"She had a moustache"  
  
"And Duckface Fox-Leonard was a nice old stick"  
  
"Memories of the horrid Duckface have left me congenitally incapable of forming a romantic attachment with woman, man or beast from that day to this!"  
  
"So," they concluded, "we ran away and assumed new identities."  
  
"After all I've done for you Javert Fitzwilliam Darcy! Eton, Oxford, hunt balls . . ."  
  
"YOU JUST AIN'T GOTTA NO RESPECT!"  
  
At which the two women begin beating their sons with their handbags. The other Amis would have laughed but by this time they are engulfed in their own parental related hell. Only Gavroche sits back, smiling and serene. Until he sees the figure of a pretty blonde woman looking at him intently.  
  
"Who are you?"  
  
"My name is Fantine. And, since my own child hasn't been stupid enough to get herself killed yet, I've been sent o bee your mummy. Isn't that nice?"  
  
"Oh £&&£$&(", exclaims Gavroche  
  
"It seems someone has a bit of a potty mouth. Maybe it needs washing out with soap."  
  
On a far away cloud the Bishop chuckled to himself. Yes, heaven was proving to been a place of infinite entertainment. 


	2. It happened of itself

it happened of itself  
  
A/N. WARNING - EXTREME SENTIMENTALITY!  
And I NEVER thought I'd find myself writing a Marius POV story!  
This is a weird little ficlet that's based around that bloody four line poem on Valjean's grave at the end of the book, which has always frustrated me. Who wrote it? Why? What is it doing there? This is an attempt to provide an answer, of sorts.  
  
We often visit Pere Lachaise, my wife and I. We used to go every Sunday when the children were small. "We are taking you to see your grandfathers" Cosette would say. Now the children are grown and have other amusement but, on occasions, we still visit. There is a pattern to be followed on these visits. Upon stepping from our carriage Cosette will always buy two bunches of flowers from the old florist woman who sits outside the gate. Then we visit the tomb of my grandfather, leaving him the first bunch of flowers (violets when we can get them). The other bunch are for Cosette's father. He is buried in a simple grave at the poor end of the cemetery. It is not a place I like visiting much but I go for my wife's sake. Partly this is because that end of the cemetery has such a cheerless, forbidding aspect - the grass is always wet, even in the height of summer and wet feet are certain to bring on a chill (In my old age I am grown as bad as Joly ever was). Cosette laughs at me when I tell her this. The second reason why I do not like to go there I have never told her. It would be ridiculous to do so since I scarcely believe it myself.  
  
It would have been a scant year after our marriage and we had gone to Pere Lachaise to visit her father's grave. We had picked it out from the other poor graves surrounding it with considerable difficult, since it was unmarked and everything was overgrown. We had left the flowers and, after a time, Cosette, had dashed off to explore. She could wander for hours amongst the gravestones, lost in rapt fascination and a melancholy she did not quite understand. I, on the other hand, have seen too much death to be entertained by the place. In all frankness it depresses me. I went and sat myself down on a fallen tree branch at some distance from the graves. Naturally, as I sat there, my thoughts fell upon my father-in-law, and chiefly upon his tombstone. It was a plain thing, only a little step above a pauper's grave - as he had requested. It also bore no name - also at his request - but this seemed to me wrong. Wrong that it did not say M Fauchelvent, the name I knew him by, or Jean Valjean, his true name - or any other of the names he must have gone by. It was wrong, to my mind, that there was nothing to indicate a man in the grave at all. It might as well have been an animal's grave - and I'm sure the Emperor gave his war horses better burials.  
  
Coming to the end of this train of thought my eye fell on a man and a woman walking up the path towards me. They wee both dressed in deep mourning - the woman in a thick black cloak with the hood pulled up and the man in a top hat and caped carrick with the collar raised - so that at first, I could see neither of their faces. As they came nearer I was able to observe them more closely. The man looked to be about fifty, and the woman between twenty-five and thirty. They could have been anyone - father and daughter, a bourgeois with a young wife - any ordinary person. And yet I found myself shrinking back from them, suddenly feeling cold despite the sunny day.. It became clear that they were looking for a grave in the same area as that of my father -in-law's.  
  
"Hurry up," the man said to the woman, "we haven't much time"  
  
And, with sure steps, he lead her on through the tangled grass and dandelion, finally coming to a halt in front of a simple tomb - none other than that of Jean Valjean!  
I was certainly surprised, and yet there was so much that I did not know about Valjean that I was not shocked. - they could still have been anyone.  
The woman pulled back her hood, revealing a sheet of corn blonde hair, and the man removed his hat, showing a tight queue of grey hair held by a black ribbon. They both made the sign of the cross and bowed their heads. There was something uncannily familiar about this pair, which mad me even more nervous of them.  
  
"We're not really meant to be here, are we?" said the woman. "Are you sure we're doing the right thing?"

"Yes," the man replied firmly, "Yes we are"

Seeming to take courage from her companion's firmness, the woman continued in a brighter voice, "Well, are you going to do it then?"

"I? But the words are yours, not mine!"

"But the idea was yours. And anyway, I need you to help me write them"

The man gave a wry smile, knelt down and, producing a piece of chalk from one of the capacious pockets of his greatcoat, chalked something onto the tombstone - it looks to be about four lines from where I was sitting. Then he stood up and turned to the woman with a grim, saying; "Not so difficult really - you see!"

I had rose in consternation a this point, and was about to make towards the strange pair to ask them precisely what they thought they were doing, when the man looked at me. His gaze made my blood run cold. In that instant he was not merely familiar - I realised that I certainly did know him, knew his face, his name, could picture perfectly the last time I had seen him. But it was not possible! For it would mean that I was looking into the face of a dead man! I was no believer in the supernatural, yet I could not deny that the man before me was none other than Inspector Javert. Having escaped the barricades and aided Jean Valjean to return me home he had committed suicide - yet was standing in front of me a year later as plain as day! I began to tremble and removed my gaze from the spectre's face, fixing it upon the woman. Yet about her too there was something eerily, implaceably familiar, something that hovered just beyond where my mind could grasp it.  
  
"Come now - we should be going," said the figure who could not possibly be Javert.  
  
"Can't we wait a moment?" the woman pleaded, "I did so want to see HER - and the boy. I wish to see him close to. Tell me again what he is like"

"Very handsome, soft hearted and tender but with not a gram of sense to his name. We really should leave now."

"Oh", said the woman sorrowfully, "I did so want to see Cosette."

"But you can see her whenever you like"

"No," she explained with touching simplicity, "to see face to face"

A muscle twitched in the Inspector's face and he stood perfectly still as if considering something. Then, seeming to have made up his mind, he took the woman's hand and began to move towards me, saying simply, "Come"

It was at this point that Cosette returned, she came up behind me and grabbed my shoulder, making me start considerably.  
  
"Dreaming again, Marius dear? Really now, whatever are you looking at?"  
  
She was radiant with live and health and happiness, my dear wife, and glowing with the specially flush of the pregnant woman. I tore my eyes away from her and looked at the strange couple. The woman was watching Cosette intently and her cheeks were wet with tears. Yet she was smiling a broad, fond, beautiful smile. It was the first time I had seen her smile and it was then that I realised who she was. I remembered the words of Jean Valjean "Your mother's name as Fantine and you must bow your head whenever you speak it. She loved you greatly and she suffered greatly."

"Well, aren't you going to answer Monsieur Head-in-the-Air?" Cosette teased, "People will start to think you're simple if you carry on like this you know!"

I looked up again at the unearthly pair, and could have sworn that Javert winked at me, both as if in gratification that Cosette had confirmed his opinion of me, and as if to say 'Yes boy, I know you can see us - though you shouldn't be able to. Don't worry, we'll be out of your way soon'

Cosette, clearly, could not make out the two figures in front of us, and was beginning to grow disconcerted, I turned to her and said; "It was nothing dear. I was just thinking about angels"

"Angels? You are odd! Come along, let's go - the carriage is waiting!"

I put my arm around her and we left. I turned back once to look behind me, but there was no trace of anyone there.  
  
As I have said, I was no believer in thing supernatural, but I was troubled by this encounter. So, the next day, I returned to Pere Lachaise alone to 'lay the ghost' as it were. There was nothing supernatural about the place at all - it was a s depressingly mundane as always. But, when I reached Valjean's grave, I found these four lines chalked upon it in a neat and steady hand  
  
He sleeps. Although so much he was denied,  
He lived, and when his dear love left him, died.  
It happened of itself in that came way.  
Which in the evening night time follows day.


	3. The Martyrdom of Jeanne Baptiste

The Bishop's sister reflects on things. A little odd.

Saint. It's a word I hear rather a lot. "Ah, Mademoiselle, your brother is a saint!" and I am obliged to smile and nod to agree. For it would be a sin not to agree, since it is true. Still, to live with a saint is not easy. In fact it is as difficult as living with the greatest of sinners - both cases are liable to lead to martyrdom for those close to them. Nevertheless, it is only women who live with sinners that receive sympathy  
He came down to breakfast today dressed in that same old soutaine - the one so old that it is barely black, with frayed cuffs and a permanent ring of dust around the bottom. When I point out how the fabric is patched and shiny and worn he simply smiles and and says that he does not mind. He dismisses my concerns in much the same way as you might sooth a child who thinks that an ogre lives in his cupboard - kindly, but with a firm conviction of the idea's stupidity. He does not mind about such things - and so I must not mind either, though the last time I had a new dress Bonaparte was still Emperor. I do not mean to sound ungrateful or materialistic but just because he enjoys living like a Trappist monk does not mean that I can even begin to find it bearable. I find that the lack of substance makes my life unreal, as if I needed the security of worldly goods to stop myself from blowing away.  
Bienvenu, evidently, does not suffer from this feeling, which is why we have no silver, and no lock on our door. Yet when my brother does these crazy, crazy things - such as inviting in passing convicts to spend the night or dancing attendance on dying revolutionaries - it is impossible to remonstrate with him. It is impossible even to be cross. One is swept up in his enthusiasm and it is only later, on reflection, that you realise that it was not what you meant to happen at all. I often wonder if the disciples felt like this, listening on the shores of Galilee while their Master talked to them in children's fables which they still could not understand? I wonder if they felt so, so stupid as I often do.  
The worst thing about living with a saint is that because Bienvenu is good people automatically expect me to be good as well - as if virtue were contagious. But sometimes I spend hours dreaming of Chinese silk and pheasants, of the joyous lost world before '89.. Not that I wasn't overshadowed by him even then. Bienvenu so handsome, charming, witty and sought after at every salon, while Baptistine was plain, silent and mousy. Generally people would simply fail to notice me - like a badly drawn figure in the background of an old fresco.  
Now once again Bienvenu is famous and adored - his piety has all the interest and colour of a Corpus Christy parade. Baptistine, on the other hand, is like an ancient relic, lying dusty and forgotten on a side alter. Or like the patched cross on Bienvenu's bedroom curtains.  
Sometimes I reflect that my parents named me well. Like John the Baptist my life was - is, although the present is a tense I find hard to use - spent in the service of him "Whose sandal I am not fit to untie" Not that Bienvenu, being a saint, would ever ask such a thing of anyone. And not for me the drama of a head on a sliver tray! Oh no, I must die for my brother through living for him.


	4. Purgatorio

Javert Post-suicide. A very strange story - really not sure what had come over me when this was written.

What he was once was is painfully clear. What he is now, what he has become, is less so. Once he had visions of a fiery angel, a figure of judgement and awe straight from the pages of Milton. Perhaps a seraphim descending from on high in a great arc of white wings, the flash of a righteous blade, the fire of infinity in his eyes and all the stars spread out before him for ever and ever. Amen? Or perhaps not, and there is bitter amusement to be gained from the idea's stupidity.  
Physically he is unchanged, retaining those least important of characteristics as a kind of keepsake. The same tunic bearing the same now vaguely meaningless insignia of rank; the greatcoat he was so attached to that he wore it even in the heat of July; the hat . . .? But the hat is missing. He realises that he must have left in on the parapet shortly before and, strangely, this bothers him for a while. His body too seems to be unaltered, as if he had merely risen from the water like Venus, like Excalibur from the lake, not having suffered at all. All just as before. The same strong hands and tired lines about the mouth - not a dripping mangled travesty, the body bloated, skin greenish, the face bruised and cut from bumping against the moored boats. Although he has seen this too, was there looking on when a washerwoman fished the body from the Seine. He watched with curiosity and could hardly forebear from taking notes.  
Yet this physical consistency is not a consolation, it does not matter, it was not who he was. Everything which might have counted towards that, which he would previously have called upon, is lost to him. Gone in an inexorable slither from the barricades down to the river. Gone who knows where. And what of the state in which he now exists? (ever educated and exact in speech 'live' seems just too ironically wrong). Usually a nebulous state which most of the time he is as unaware of as he had formerly been of kindness, mercy and the awful, awful paradox under which he lived. But sometimes he catches a glimmer of his true position, like light upon the water, the refraction from a flawed crystal or the sun shining off a knife at twilight. At these times he seeks to be with people, using their solid bustle to block out the replay of random images before his eyes which are as strange and loaded as the cards of a tarot spread - the convict, the dead boy, the drowned man, the pierced hand and broken heart of the girl he thought he knew, light upon the knife at twilight, upon the water. Often he returns to the Prefecture which, surely, was his home. He reads the motto over the door, "Surveillance et vigilance", now unsure exactly what it is meant to mean. Then he remembers when he joined the force, a bright spring day when the strong southern light bouncing off the whitewashed walls of the Toulon prison buildings was enough to blind a man. He had signed his name on a small ledger in glistening black ink with a confident flourish that was not entirely mirrored in his heart. 'Rather like Faustus', he muses, 'except my years were not utterly fatuous'. For he is forced to admit that he had been happy, and he also admits that such happiness must be paid for and is unable to argue it unfitting that one night on the Pont au Change should return him to the darkness from whence he came. How long has he been there since? It is interminable - a long time perhaps. He returns to watching his no-longer fellows come and go, powerless to intervene in their lives. How he would like to help them. A young officer fills in a routine form incorrectly and for some reason this angers him.. Angers him because he is unable to reach out and make the single pen stroke necessary to correct the mistake, because the young man has been improperly trained and does not care. And then a strange painful anger at God - a God he had never given a first or second thought to before - a God who hid Himself in smoke and ambiguity, who let him walk blindly in the wilderness for fifty-two years before opening a chasm at his feet, and who never once turned to him in all his efforts to say "Well done, thou good and faithful servant".  
These evenings at the Prefecture become more frequent, he finds himself asking with alarming frequency what he is to do now, the evenings of the glimmer start to outnumber the evenings of the mist - until one day he does not turn down the well trodden road to the Prefecture at all. Instead he heads off down an unfamiliar street leading to the leafy residential areas of the haute bourgeois. Eventually he finds himself on a street he knows he has been on before - Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire - though he is not certain as to when or why. In the drawing room there is a young woman looking out onto the street and crying and he watches the candlelight glitter on her tears and pomaded hair.  
He enters the house unaided and unobserved - oh for this gift as a policeman! It is a fine house but, subtle distinction, not a happy one. In the study he sees a black haired young man, also oddly familiar. Again the arcana starts - Heirophant, Hanged man, Thief, Angel, Inspector, Dead boy. The Dead Boy! The boy is now the picture of health, sitting and glaring resentfully at the door and sipping from a glass he keeping permanently full from a quickly emptying brandy bottle. He turns away from the dead boy, holding his image in his mind along with that of the girl with the shaking hand and broken heart.  
As he does so he hears a voice, a voice saying "Angel - for that is what you are - you must do my work now, as you have always done my work. For I know that you were always faithful in your way - you did not see me, only my reflection. You were never wrong, simple not entirely right. Now you must see me clearly. I did not desert you for the convict, you were as beloved as he -and more so, for I have work for you yet." He realises that this was what he gave his life for - for the dead boy and not the incorrect form. He considers the situation for a moment then under his eyes, as quickly and strangely as the impulses of the human mind are wont to move, the Dead Boy leaves the study and goes to the girl in the drawing room, whispering inaudible words and wiping the tears from her cheeks.  
And the Inspector? He steps into the infinite path of a thousand stars in an arc of white wings and raises his redeemed sword once more.  
For the spirit of The Lord moved upon the water, upon the knife in the twilight.


End file.
